Just checking my site today I realized that it wasnt available..I login in my hosting account and I found the following message:

We are currently experiencing accessibility issues with one of our data centers and apologize for the inconvenience. In the interim, we are disabling access to control panel tools, to minimize the effects to your site.

I have many minisites with that hosting account working for me 24/7 but now I'm realizing that maybe are not working so good as Id like to do...
should I change hosting?
What can I do about that? all this time that the sites are not running Im leaving money on the table...

Joined: 13 Jun 2006Posts: 342Location: USA/NZ/AUST/FIJI - I live where ever I like

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 11:28 pm Post subject:

No need for dedicated or VPS for simple static sites. The trick is to use reputable hosting right from day one by thoroughly doing your research. Avoid all dodgy small-time resellers. Shared hosting will do fine.

I've hosted half my sites with lunarpages and the other half with hostgator - I have 8 heavily used sites that have made 7 figures+ for me over the years. So having these sites up 24/7 is VERY, VERY important to me.

Have used both for the past 5 years with my site NEVER going down unexpectedly. They do scheduled maintenance several times a year and the site is down for about 10 minutes at times when traffic is the lowest. And this happens only once or twice and you are sent emails well in advance informing of it.

Even when lunarpages moved office and hosting to another building about 2 years ago, my site was down for only 40 minutes at a low traffic time. They also kept me informed (and all other account holders) of the downtime. This is what happens when you deal with really reputable companies.

So you're pretty happy with the performance of Hostgator? Have you used it with Wordpress blogs? I'm just curious because I have a bunch of blogs on shared hosting with a different company, and sometimes the sites take forever to load. I've been looking for another shared host with better performance that isn't super expensive._________________On Twitter: Me or Clickbank

Joined: 13 Jun 2006Posts: 342Location: USA/NZ/AUST/FIJI - I live where ever I like

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:35 pm Post subject:

Shared hosting is excellent for Simple STATIC sites. These sites DO NOT run a SQL or MYSQL database in the background.

Although turnkey Content Management Systems like Wordpress and Joomla on the surface looks like Simple Static Sites, they ARE NOT.

When you install Wordpress, joomla etc, they automatically set up your mysql database. I know Wordpress installs about 10 tables within the database and joomla around 60 - depending on what features you use.

So you are effectively using a database with these sites and shared hosting can become slow if you get a lot of traffic.

Say if I had 1000 visitors a day and my site was a pure static site with NO database, just straight html files. My site will be much faster than a site built with wordpress getting the same traffic simply because wordpress site will be running the php engine and mysql database for EVERY page being loaded - that's how its structured.

I've had a phpBB forum installed at a shared hosting. The setup is similar to wordpress in terms of running php and a database. Once I reached 10,000 members, the forum became quite slow. Now its in a VPS and doing well.

Hope this helps. Forgive me if you already know about the difference between pure static sites and CMS sites that run a database. I thought I point this difference out otherwise it would have been hard for me to explain.